Among the images published by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York for its current exhibition, "Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions,” one card immediately caught my attention: the Death card from the Visconti-Sforza deck.

Death does not appear particularly frightening. The skeleton has an almost cheerful expression, with its feet firmly touching the ground while the surface above them remains covered in gold. To me, it looks as if death is the reality that finally makes our feet touch the ground. We may feel disturbed even by its name, but it is one of the few cards that will eventually belong to a king and to the rest of us.

Tarot, however, was not created to tell us whether an ex-lover will return or what will happen in our careers next month. The Visconti-Sforza deck dates from approximately 1450 to 1480 and was painted by Bonifacio Bembo for Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti, the Duke and Duchess of Milan. The cards may have been a diplomatic or commemorative gift, and because they show relatively little wear, it is not even certain how frequently this luxurious deck was played.

What is clear is that tarot emerged in the courtly culture of 15th-century Italy as a game of skill, not as a method of divination. Its mystical identity came much later.

A conventional Italian deck contained cups, swords, batons and coins. Tarot added a sequence of allegorical trump cards, then called trionfi, or triumphs. The figures represented different forms of social, moral and cosmic power: the Emperor, the Pope, Love, Justice, Fortune, Death, the Sun, the Moon and the World.

During the game, one trump could defeat another according to its position in the hierarchy. The cards therefore did not initially predict the future. They turned a Renaissance understanding of the world into something that could be held, shuffled and played.

But what could possibly triumph over Death?

To understand the logic behind this question, the 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch’s I Trionfi offers an important key. In his allegorical sequence, Love first triumphs over humanity. Chastity then defeats Love, Death defeats Chastity, Fame defeats Death, Time defeats Fame and Eternity finally triumphs over Time.

Fame can defeat Death because a person’s name, work and memory may survive the body. Yet Petrarch does not allow Fame to become immortality. Time eventually destroys reputation too. Fame is only a temporary stage between Death and Eternity.

Our culture often seems to stop Petrarch’s sequence at Fame. Visibility is treated as evidence of value, while being remembered is confused with being repeatedly seen.

Yet digital culture has not exactly made time move faster; it has shortened the life of our attention. If Petrarch were writing today, Fame might become visibility or virality, while Time might become the feed: the system that makes someone visible and begins replacing them almost immediately.

We are not suspended permanently at the Fame stage. We are moved rapidly between visibility and algorithmic forgetting.

Manifestation culture attempts to resolve this instability by asking us to visualize the result we want. The relationship, career, body, house or level of recognition is imagined in enough detail that the future begins to feel almost owned.

This can offer motivation and emotional direction, but it can also discourage us from confronting time, failure, mortality and the role of circumstances beyond individual control. At some point, the content is no longer showing us a possible road. It is selling us a title deed to an imagined future.

At the same time that the Morgan is examining tarot in New York, the Grand Palais in Paris is presenting France’s first monographic exhibition devoted to Hilma af Klint. "Paintings for the Temple,” on view until Aug. 30, brings together the monumental spiritual project she developed between 1906 and 1915.

Af Klint created 193 paintings intended as parts of an ideal temple, combining spiritualism, Theosophy, biblical references and modern science. She worked through seances, meditation and collective practices, particularly through the women’s group known as The Five.

Tarot turned invisible forces into a portable visual system. Af Klint carried a similar belief in the power of images to the scale of an entire temple.

Yet the quality I find most striking in her work is not simply the courage to appear different; it is her ability to create without requiring immediate visibility. Her imagination was not aimless; it was highly disciplined and tied to a spiritual mission.

She believed the paintings formed a system through which humanity’s spiritual evolution could be understood. Af Klint also stipulated that her abstract works should remain unseen until 20 years after her death because she believed her own period was not ready to understand them.

In an age when artists, writers and almost everyone else are encouraged to build visibility before they have even completed the work, there is something almost unimaginable about her decision. Af Klint did not remove Fame from Petrarch’s sequence, but she was willing to let Time come first.

What I envy is not simply her freedom to be different, but her freedom from the need for an immediate audience.

The Morgan and Grand Palais exhibitions do not prove that society has suddenly become more religious. They do, however, show how willing major cultural institutions have become to examine esotericism, spiritualism and occult imagery as serious parts of art history.

A museum does not confirm whether a mystical belief is true; it confirms that the object and the ideas surrounding it have cultural importance.

At the same time, placing an object behind glass can make it safer. The museum gives the occult historical legitimacy while removing it from the ritual setting in which it once operated.

The museum turns the occult into an archive and an art-historical subject; social media turns it into a personal development tool. Af Klint’s universal temple becomes an individual vision board, while tarot’s confrontation with uncertainty is sometimes reduced to the question of what the universe is about to deliver to us.

Because I am interested in mysticism, tarot and art, my own social media algorithm regularly shows me videos announcing, "If you are seeing this, you are special,” or suggesting that a particular message has found me at precisely the right moment.

The mechanism creates the sensation that the content was not simply recommended but destined. This is where fate becomes algorithmic.

The Oracle in "The Matrix" offers a useful comparison. She is eventually revealed not as a supernatural being but as an intuitive program created to study the human psyche. She does not merely observe a predetermined future. She understands human choices, offers information and influences the actions that help produce the future she appears to predict.

Social media algorithms operate through a much less mystical version of this loop. They infer our interests from previous behavior, show us material consistent with those interests and then use our new behaviour to refine the original prediction.

The system appears to know us partly because it is continuously helping shape what we see, desire and eventually become. "Algorithmic prophecy” may therefore be more accurate than algorithmic fate.

Research on Generation Z complicates the assumption that distance from organized religion means the disappearance of spiritual interest. A 2024 fact sheet from the Public Religion Research Institute found that 34% of American Gen Z adults identified as religiously unaffiliated.

Yet in a separate 2022 survey by the Springtide Research Institute, 77% of young respondents described themselves as spiritual. The studies use different samples and definitions and should not be treated as a direct comparison. Still, they point toward a more complicated reality: religious affiliation and spiritual curiosity are not the same thing.

Springtide describes this approach as "faith unbundled”: young people combine beliefs, practices and identities from religious and nonreligious sources instead of receiving all of them from a single institution.

Tarot, astrology, meditation, manifestation and inherited religious practices can therefore exist in the same personal system without being experienced as contradictions.

This does not make young people foolish or automatically more superstitious. These practices can provide a language for uncertainty, small rituals, a sense of community and the feeling that life has direction.

They become more questionable when structural problems are translated entirely into personal energy. Unemployment becomes a failure to develop an abundance mindset; loneliness becomes the result of a low frequency; success becomes evidence of alignment.

The individual is given a sense of control, but can also be made responsible for every disappointment.

The need for meaning and belonging remains real and largely collective. The answers offered to that need, however, are becoming increasingly personalised, algorithmic and consumable.

In the image published by the Morgan, Death still appears almost amused. Perhaps because Death already knows what our attention economy repeatedly forgets: visibility is not eternity, and not every part of life can be manifested into submission.